Bad Settler Craziness
The radical settlers of Samaria, reading the writing on the wall, seem to be planning all kinds of nefarious activities:
An article in its Internet-distributed pamphlet "The Jewish Voice" includes a call to "execute targeted operations against the evildoers, invade Civil Administration offices and ransack them, as well as operate violently [sic] against the Palestinians, deepen the refusal to serve in the army and not recognize Israeli courts." The article was written by Rabbi Yosef Elitzur of the "Od Yosef Hai" yeshiva in Yitzhar.
Yes, a rabbi. A rabbi who would violate Jewish law, Israeli law, every law, because he worships the golden calf of land to the exclusion of every other Jewish value. I don't know Elitzur, but I know his mentor, Yitzhak Ginzburg, who is a true racist and fascist, the spiritual mentor of a movement that is the Jewish equivalent of Hezbollah. I've been following these guys for years; the pressure of the settlement moratorium is getting to them, but it's not just the moratorium -- it's the growing Israeli recognition that settlement in Judea and Samaria is untenable. This recognition is causing the settler hardcore to turn their backs on the Israeli state, with potentially disastrous consequences. And speaking of the Israeli consensus, this is what Dov Weisglass, Ariel Sharon's former chief of staff, and not exactly a lefty, just had to say about continued settlement:
What Sharon understood, and Olmert after him, is now becoming apparent to the current government: Good or bad, just or unjust, that is the reality. No one in the world agrees to Israel's presence in a majority of the Judea and Samaria territories and the continued construction there. Israeli persistence will bring upon it diplomatic isolation, and this is something that Israel cannot afford. The freeze plan is an attempt to avoid this. It is not important in and of itself, but as a first sign of a process of understanding and sobriety, it is highly meaningful.